Hurricane Instrumentation
RAPID Facility instrumentation has been deployed to document damage from over a dozen extreme wind events including wind storms in Washington State, hurricanes throughout the southeast, tornadoes across the south and midwest, and the Iowa Derecho. A common component in virtually all of these investigations includes the deployment of Streetview to capture the as-damaged state of the natural and built environment. Partnering reconnaissance groups such as StERR and GEER have assembled large teams of field experts and enhanced their data collection via RAPID drones, Lidar scanners and Streetview. Follow-up detailed studies from individual investigators focus on a specific building type (e.g. large volume buildings), lifelines (e.g. water towers), and comparative structural performance (e.g. pre- and post- Florida Building Code residential structures).
Wind events are often multi-hazard by nature. Some deployments also used RAPID instruments to document hydrodynamic coastal processes and associated geological failures such as landslides and coastal erosion from Hurricane Florence, and the characterization of design-level surge and resultant damage from Hurricane Michael.
